


Midday at the New Rose Hotel

by dashakay



Series: Blackout [2]
Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: F/M, Joctavia, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 01:46:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7782112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashakay/pseuds/dashakay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Partnership, both kinds, is an adjustment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midday at the New Rose Hotel

**Author's Note:**

> Mai and Katie saved this story and all the thanks in the world go to them.
> 
> The title is an homage to William Gibson, my favorite writer.
> 
> Belter Creole words, most courtesy of Nick Farmer and a few I came up with, are in italics. There’s a glossary at the end of the story.
> 
> The story is second in a series but you don't need to read the others to understand this one.

The breath catches in Octavia’s throat as she walks through the doors of Star Helix. It’s Monday morning and she shouldn’t be concerned with much more than getting enough coffee in her to stay awake during roll call but her stupid heart is skittering with nerves. You’re a grown adult, not a schoolgirl, she tells herself, but her stomach constricts into a tight ball all the same. 

He’s leaning against his desk, reading something on his hand terminal, one hand tucking a strand of hair behind his ears, then rubbing his cleanly shaven jaw. She senses that skitter and thump again. 

Miller’s head turns slowly in her direction, as if he’s sensed her presence from across the room. His face is expressionless and something inside of her sinks. It didn’t happen, Saturday night. He wasn’t in her bed, her arms, her body. It wasn’t real. 

Then she spots the ghost of a wink in his eye and she knows it happened. It happened and he remembers. He’s telling her it’ll be all right, after all. 

She smiles. 

* 

Most nights Miller follows her home like the orphan he is. He doesn't ask, just follows her onto the Tube. Every time they ride the train together, she thinks of that tipsy blacked-out night when something hidden deep inside her made her kiss him in the dark. 

As soon as the door is closed, the glass walls frosted for privacy, they fall on each other like starving animals. Sometimes they can’t even make it to her bedroom. He pushes her down onto the sofa, kissing her everyhere. She blindly unbuttons his shirt, dying to feel his warm skin and coarse chest hair against her breasts and belly. He pushes her trousers down and unzips his, lifts her leg and yes, he’s inside her, so deep inside that she forgets where she ends and he begins. 

“Octavia,” he always moans as he’s entering her and the emergence of her given name from his mouth is enough to make her almost come. 

* 

Later, after they’ve burned off the heat of the day’s work together, they can relax. She orders in food, dosas one day, bibimbap the next. They sprawl on her bed, half dressed, and talk. Sometimes they discuss the case of the moment, chewing over the endless details of gang wars and drug deals. 

He likes to hear about her life, the tangled limbs of her family tree. 

“Your great-grandfather came from Jamaica but his wife was Pakistani?” he asks, slathering his dosa with mint chutney. Crumbs rain down on the bedsheets but she doesn’t even mind. 

“Anglo-Indian. They met here, working the docks.” She takes a sip of the rather good Martian bourbon he brought the other day, letting it roll on her tongue. 

“But it was your grandparents who made all the money, right?” 

She winces. She doesn’t want him to think of her as merely the girl with the rich family. It’s too simple, too reductive. “Somehow they saved the scrip to start buying and selling gold. They set up a stall to sell Indian bridal jewelry. Later they invested in holo parlors.” 

He never talks about his own family.

* 

After they've eaten and the imaginary sky has turned dark, they can take their time with each other. He lies on the bed with the sheets balled up in his fingers as she takes him into her mouth. She enjoys teasing him—running her tongue along the ridge on the underside of his cock, swirling her tongue on the head, sucking him deep inside her mouth and then letting it slip out again. 

“You’re killing me,” he groans and she feels a rush of power. She has the ability to give him pleasure and take it away. 

* 

She meets Julisa, her partner when she was a rookie, for lunch on her day off. They take their sandwiches and soup to a table in the back of the restaurant. 

Before Octavia has taken her first bite, Julisa grins and says, “So, you’re giving Miller the old  _pashang-pashang_ , eh?” 

Blood rushes to her cheeks. “What are you talking about?” 

Julisa laughs and tosses her head of thick dreads. “Octavia,” she says in a mock-scolding voice. “I live across the street from you. I  _see_  things.”  

Just  _what_ did Julisa see? Octavia frantically wonders if they ever neglected to frost the windows. 

“Look at you, all blushing and shit. Yesterday around 0600, I went out for a run and saw Miller, sneaking out of your place.” 

“Ugh,” she says, shaking her head. “This is so bad.” 

Patting on her hand, Julisa says, “Hey, we’ve all been there. Just be careful. Fucking your partner—it can get complicated.” 

Octavia drops her spoon in the bowl of cream of tomato. “It’s more than fucking.”

“That’s even worse,” Julisa says.

* 

He sits with his back propped against the headboard and she straddles him, moving her hips in time to music only she can hear in her head. She looks into his eyes, wondering how she worked with him for so long without really seeing him, the angles and the planes of his face that are now beloved to her. He licks his lips and she kisses them, soft and yielding to hers. 

Miller’s hands cup her ass and now he’s directing the show, urging her to speed up and then to slow. She grasps his shoulders, trying to hold on as they move together faster. She feels sweat trickle down her spine. 

“ _Mi_ …” she hears herself say and just manages to stop herself. She’s afraid to finish the sentence, afraid he won’t say it back to her.

“What?” he asks, his face contorted with desire. 

“Nothing, Joe.” 

She only calls him Joe when they’re alone. At the station and on the streets he’s Miller, plain Miller, her partner—nothing more and nothing less. 

*

Over the days and weeks, more and more of his things migrate to her apartment. First a razor and a tube of shaving cream, next a white dress shirt is hanging in her closet. She finds dark men’s socks in her dresser drawer and a pair of black oxfords peeking out from under the bed.

Sometimes she feels like Luna or Mars, as if she’s slowly and surely being colonized.

*

Octavia graduated second in her class at the Star Helix Academy. She would have been first but a guy named Alfaro, nearly two meters tall, beat her in the wall-climbing test. She won Rookie of the Year for her part in busting up the ring trafficking little boys. She’s earned four commendations since then for outstanding service. 

She loves being a cop. She’s all too aware of how many people see Star Helix officers as collaborators with the  _tumang_ , the  _inyalowda_ , but she knows that they also save lives. They bust dealers selling shit to little kids, throw domestic abusers into lockup. They catch murderers, water thieves and arsonists. 

Octavia often feels a small surge of pride when she puts on her shoulder holster, feels her gun resting against her side. 

That’s why it bothers her that lately she’s become distracted. 

They’re interrogating a suspected low-level Golden Bough member, probably just an errand boy. The kid is tall and skinny, like so many raised in the lower levels, with greasy hair slicked back. His stick-like arms are covered in intricate whorls of multicolored tattoos and his eyes are defiant. 

There’s a definite rhythm to interrogating a suspect two-on-one. Good cop and bad cop. She’s always the good one. Miller would never get away with it, whereas she, with her large eyes and soft features, is the perfect good cop. 

“You gotta tell me who’s up the chain from you,” Miller says. “Possession of 50 grams of ZD is major time,  _sabe_.”  

“ _Pashang fong_ ,” the boy growls in what he must think is menacing manner. 

Octavia glances at the interrogation table, stained with more than a decade of spilled coffee and blood. She imagines bending over it, her bare ass in the air as Miller slowly enters her, centimeter by centimeter until she’s full, complete. Hands gripping her hips, he thrusts into her, hard and fast. 

“Muss,” she dimly hears a voice say. “Muss, you still with us?” Miller snaps his fingers in the air. 

“Yeah, sorry.” Octavia shakes her head bring herself back into the real world. She looks at the kid, at the fear and insolence in his watery blue eyes. She smiles. “Takao,” she says, her voice deliberately gentle. “We want to help you out of this mess.” 

Later that night, she tells Miller what was going on in her brain. “You have to compartmentalize,” he says.

She doesn’t know if she's able to do that.

* 

The New Rose Hotel is in the lower levels, ten small rooms and the same rodent-like little guy at the front desk twenty-four hours a day. He never asks questions and is sure not to tell tales. If he did that, he’d be straight out of business. 

The place is a love hotel, strictly rent-by-the-hour. Its patrons are unlicensed hookers and their johns, drunk couples from the nearby bars too horny to make it home, and sometimes young couples looking to get away from sharing a two-room apartment with three generations. 

The rooms are relatively clean at least, the sheets changed between customers. Each room contains a large bed, a scarred bureau, and a tiny cubicle with a toilet, sink, and a shower that charges by the minute, pre-pay only. 

 “We shouldn’t be doing this again,” she says, locking the door behind them. “We’re on duty.” 

Miller shrugs out of his holster and it joins hers on the scarred laminate top of the dresser. “Lunch hour,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt. 

Octavia sighs. This is not the kind of cop she ever wanted to be, but she can’t help herself. Not when he gives her that look and whispers “New Rose?” in her ear. 

There isn’t enough time for niceties when they’re at the hotel. She leaves her bra on but Miller likes it that way, his tongue swirling over her lace-covered nipples. He enters her and she bites her lip, her legs wrapped high on his back. 

Try as she might, she doesn’t understand how he does this to her. She keeps waiting for the intensity, this burning, to die down as all her previous relationships had but instead it gets stronger and stronger by the day. She wonders how he can do this to her, to make her feel like she’s melted into his body. Each time feels like the first time, hot and soaring high. 

Her fingernails dig into his back as her climax rips through her. 

* 

Water is rationed yet again, so she conserves water for almost a week. Octavia’s bathroom has a tub, installed by previous owners during more optimistic times. She’s never used it before today.

She lets the water run hot and then they step in. Her back rests on his chest, his arms wrapped around her. She closes her eyes and breathes in the steamy, fragrant air. 

This is the only place I want to be, she thinks, opening her eyes to see their feet tangled together near the spigot. He makes a low, humming noise and tangles his fingers in her curls. She’s never felt safer or more content.

Miller whispers in her ear, his breath warm against her ear.

She smiles at his words. They’re simple words, only one syllable each, three in total, but they mean so much.

There will be time later to say them to him, too. She closes her eyes again and feels his heart beating between her shoulder blades while they float together in their small, private sea.

* 

Miller is sprawled on the ground, a splotch of blood spreading on the white fabric of his shirt, near the shoulder. She smells gunpowder, the shot still ringing in her head. 

She runs to him. “Are you okay?”

He lifts his head, his face grimacing in pain. “Yeah, I think so,” he says, his voice strained. “Go, Muss. Get that motherfucker.”

“I don’t want to leave you, Miller.”

“Get. Him. Now.”

She turns and runs down the passageway, dodging pedestrians. Fuck, she thinks frantically. Don’t let him die. Don’t let him be hurt badly. She wants to run back to Miller with every fiber of her being. “Officer down!” she shouts into her terminal. “We’ve got an officer down on the third level, Sector M-22.” 

There, now she can see him. The suspect sprints around the corner and into the night market, crowded with shoppers and food stalls. He fades into the crowd and disappears. “Request backup,” she says. “Request backup and a med team, STAT.” 

Octavia stalks through the mass of people, bargaining and eating  _halohae_ , searching for the stocky, bald guy, armed and dangerous and willing to shoot at a cop. He’s nowhere to be found. There are at least six doors in and out of this place. The  _sabaka_  could be anywhere. 

Two fellow officers find her. “Where’d he go?” one says. 

“He’s gone,” she says, hearing her heartbeat in her ears. “He got away, piece of shit.” 

“We got you covered,” the other officer says, her hand on her gun. “Go to your partner.” 

Octavia runs back down the long passageway, a trip that seems to last an hour. She finally finds Miller at the end of it, shirt off and sitting up with his hair in his eyes, surrounded by a team of medics. 

“Just a flesh wound, Muss,” he rasps. She can tell he’s trying not to show the pain in his face.

“Took a pretty good chunk out of him but nothing too bad. Bullet went in and out. Some stitches and he’ll be good as new,” a medic says, pressing gauze to Miller’s upper back. 

She sinks to her knees before him, wishing she could touch him, make him feel better, tell him she loves him, but she knows she’s not allowed to. 

 * 

“What can I do for you today, Muss?” Captain Shaddid says, sitting down behind her desk. 

Octavia sits straight up in her chair and takes a deep breath. “I want to request a transfer,” she says. 

* 

They lie in her bed, nose to nose. 

“I asked Shaddid for a transfer,” Octavia says. 

Miller sits up with a groan. “Why _?”_  

She lays her hand on his bare thigh. “I love you and I love being a cop but I can’t do both at the same time.” 

He sighs. “Is it the shooting?” Over the last ten days his stitches have dissolved but there’s still an ugly scab, the skin around it bright pink and angry-looking. 

“Yes. And no. It’s a lot of things. It’s being unfocused. It’s running off for nooners at the New Rose. It’s thinking only about you when my head needs to be in the game. The way we’re acting; it’s dangerous for the both of us.” 

“Come here,” he says and she sits up and leans into his uninjured shoulder.

“It was the worst moment of my life, seeing you lying there.” Tears are blurring her vision. 

“I know,” he says, as if soothing a child. “I know.” 

“I just…” she sighs, “I don’t want to lose you, Joe.” 

“You’re not going to.” He kisses the top of her head. 

* 

Octavia is standing in the locker room at the Tenth Precinct, pinning up a few stray locks of hair. Sveta Hendricks, her new partner, is waiting outside to give her a tour of the station. 

Her terminal buzzes in her pocket. She pulls it out to find a message. 

 _Just not the same without you here, partner. See you tonight._  

She smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Your comments are welcomed like water on Ceres.
> 
>  **Belter Creole Glossary** (words with asterisks are ones I’ve come up with myself):
> 
> Pashang - Curse word roughly equivalent to "fuck"
> 
> Mi - I/me
> 
> Tumang – Earthers
> 
> Inyalowda – People from the inner planets, non-Belters
> 
> Sabe – You know
> 
> Pashang fong - Fuck off
> 
> *Halohae – a dessert of shaved ice, condensed milk, fruit and other toppings (derived from the Filipino word “halo halo”)
> 
> Sabaka – curse word (derived from the Russian word for “dog”)


End file.
